Yosemite as few have seen

As Colin Delehanty, left, reorganizes his backpack before hiking to a higher altitude to photograph a sunset time lapse sequence, Sheldon Neill takes images with his iPhone in between filming time lapses.

Photo: Alejandra Bayardo, Staff

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - Colin Delehanty had to go higher. He needed to see what worlds opened up on the next peak.

He and his party had spent a September morning climbing 1,500 vertical feet of switchbacks from the floor of Yosemite's Lyell Canyon, edging up the shoulder of Potter Point along a well-kept trail. But near the top of the tree line, they struck off into unmarked terrain, guided only by a goal: Up.

Delehanty, a 25-year-old photographer from Burlingame, Calif., had spotted the hint of a High Sierra vista. But once there he saw something higher, more promising still. And on it went.

Dimming light and dwindling water eventually persuaded most of the group to turn around. But Delehanty shouldered his pack and stepped onto the saddle leading to the next peak. He would spend hours on top, setting up special camera equipment to capture the setting sun and rising moon - alone, in the cold, as storm clouds gathered.

"Determination," he had answered on the hike up, when asked what separated his work from others.

Delehanty and his 21-year-old photography partner, Sheldon Neill, earned Internet acclaim this year when they released their online video project, "Yosemite HD." The two used time-lapse imagery - playing through hundreds of still pictures like a flip book - to showcase the changing environment in a way the naked eye could never perceive: shadow and light dancing across the landscape, clouds shape-shifting through the sky.

Delehanty and Neill are heirs to a rich tradition of capturing the glory of national parks, following in the footsteps of famed photographers such as Ansel Adams.

But they are among a small cadre of pioneers experimenting with newer techniques like "motion time lapse," where cameras slide along tracks known as dollies that enable the frame to move across space as the pictures move across time.

The two were almost certainly the first people committed enough - or crazy enough - to haul two of the 6-foot-long dollies along for the rigorous hike up Half Dome. Since January, their stunning look at California's most famous national park has drawn more than 3 million views online.

Now they are hard at work on their sequel, reaching deeper, and higher, into the park.